Books About Love to Melt Your Icy Heart

Love is in the air. And featured on pink and red boxes of chocolate. And on glittery greeting cards at the drugstore. And all over your Instagram feed. And in sentimental TV commercials for diamond rings (why do they spin like that?). And in telephone conversation when your mom calls to ask if you just saw your cousin’s #tbt wedding-day Instagram or that commercial with the spinning diamond rings, hint hint.

Tell your mom to relax and read more Tolstoy, that bearer of timeless wisdom, always the answer to everything. As Anna Karenina says, “[I]f it is true that there are as many minds as there are heads, then there are as many kinds of love as there are hearts.” Take the hint from Tolstoy’s great heroine, or anti-heroine, and apply that axiom to your reading this month. Below are our picks for February reading, which delve into love in all forms—and its consequences.

Love is a many-splendored mystery, as the protagonist of Unrue’s novel finds out, after she’s hired to search for a stranger on a country estate. Who is she looking for? Reminiscent of Turning of the Screw, but woven together in lush, cryptic prose, this is a literary erotic thriller whose central mystery lies at the heart of a sad love triangle.

Dystopian science fiction is everywhere. So what sets apart this haunting and heartbreaking novel, about a young girl who survives a plague that wipes out most of the population? Both the author and her heroine are total badasses; the prose and the young girl are unrelenting in their purpose, which for the main character, is to find a cure for the plague, after her brother becomes ill. Reminiscent of Hunger Games and José Saramago’s Blindness and McCarthy’s The Road, this is an epic about love and hope that will inspire—and probably be screening at a movie theater near you in the next few years.

When the government orders that the population of Sweetland, an isolated and insular town on a remote Canadian island, must relocate, Michael Sweetland, whose ancestors settled the town, refuses. The novel unfolds as he remembers the island’s folklore and his family’s history, while watching his neighbors leave their homes. Beautifully capturing the wild, rugged landscape, Crummey has written a novel about love for the land one is from.

McClelland is an award-winning human-rights journalist who has covered events in Burma, Uganda, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and all over the U.S—including an Amazon warehouse. When she returned home after covering the earthquake in Haiti in 2010, she began suffering symptoms of P.T.S.D. Her memoir is about the cultural history of P.T.S.D., as she learns to live with and treat the disorder—all while falling in love, and trying to reconcile opening a heart that is in such need of repair. It’s a disturbing, intimate, and emotional book about love for everyone who has suffered from P.T.S.D.

This isn’t out until early March, technically, but maybe you’ll get lucky and encounter a stack at your local bookstore a little early—it’s Ishiguro’s first novel in a decade and people are excited! I am excited! Saxon warriors, orphans, knights, Romans . . . new terrain for the author of Never Let Me Go and The Remains of the Day, his most famous novels, both set in the 20th century on country estates. In his latest, an elderly couple decide to set out in search of a son they have not seen in many years, braving mysterious, maybe even magical, dangers along the way. Inspired by the love they have for a son who has disappeared, the journey reminds them of the love they share for each other.

O.K., O.K. It is almost Valentine’s Day. So, even though this book of poetry isn’t due until April, it’s worth putting on your list, and looking up some of Siken’s poetry to impress that special someone. His first book, Crush, became a poetry best-seller. His are poems of passion, examining what it means to love, to be, and to create.